I've been wondering the case of Teresa Youngblut and Felix Bauckholt. A hotel employee called the cops on them because they were "dressed in tactical clothing and protective gear, while also being armed". Does this pass the threshold of "too weird" in New England? Or maybe it was New England forbearance that let them get away with it for as long as they did? Or maybe it's possible to be weird in New England, as long as one has the right kind of vibe.

Do you have any advice for people financially exposed to capabilities progress on how not to do dumb stuff, not be targeted by political pressure, etc.?

Yes, Dan Luu wrote about how he writes a lot because he's a fast typer.

See also Jevon's paradox.

Maybe people notice that AIs are being drawn into the moral circle / a coalition, and are using that opportunity to bargain for their own coalition's interests.

Yeah, you and I agree that people can clearly distinguish between my senses 1 and 2. I was responding to Paradiddle, who I read as conflating the two — he defines "conscious" as both "awake and aware" and as "there is something it [is] like to be us". I could have been clearer about this.

I believe grad students and Less Wrong users in these conversations are usually working with sense 2, but in fact sense 2 is multiple things and different people mean different things, to the extent they mean anything at all.

Paradiddle claims to the contrary that practically everyone in these conversations is talking about the same thing and just has different intuitions about how it works. But you seem to disagree with Paradiddle? Are you saying that Critch's subjects aren't talking about what you mean by "conscious"?

I'm not Critch and I haven't read much philosophy, but I am the kind of person who he would have interviewed in the OP. It's clear to me that there are at least two senses of the word "conscious".

1. There's the mundane sense which is just a synonym for "awake and aware", as opposed to "asleep" or "lifeless". "Is the patient conscious yet?" (This is cluster 11 in the OP.)

2. There's the sense(s) that get brought up in the late-night bull sessions Critch is talking about. "We are subjective beings." "There is something it is like to be us."

I confess sense 2 doesn't make any sense to me, but I'm linguistically competent enough to understand it's not the same as sense 1. I know these senses are different because the correct response to "Are you conscious?" in sense 1 is "Yes, I can hear you and I'm awake now", and a correct response to "Are you conscious?" in sense 2 is to have an hour-long conversation about what it means.

So, this claim is at odds with my experience as an English speaker:

the obvious answer to what people mean by consciousness is the fact that it is like something to be them, i.e., they are subjective beings.

Libertarianism teaches that when one wants an economic outcome, one may be tempted to use government to get that outcome; but one should use private-sector tools instead, even if it means inventing a new kind of institution.

When one craves meaning and community, one's first thought is to reach for religion. But one should look for other sources of meaning and community first, including inventing one's own meaning and inventing new kinds of communities.

Yes, you can ask for a lot more than that :)

Yes. As a special case, if you destroy a bad old institution, you can't count on good new institutions springing up in its place unless you specifically build them.